'Red flashing warning': Expert says Republicans are perfecting 'sabotage' of elections

Even though a Republican attempt to overturn a state election result has been likely halted for good by a federal judge, one legal expert is cautioning Americans that this may be just the beginning of the GOP's efforts to subvert democracy.

In a Tuesday essay for Slate, author Mark Joseph Stern said Democrats shouldn't be so quick to celebrate the recent decision by U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers (an appointee of President Donald Trump) regarding last year's North Carolina Supreme Court election. Myers ordered that North Carolina election officials certify last November's race in which Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by just 734 total votes.

Stern argued that even though Democrats prevailed in this instance, the last six months of Griffin's repeated attempts to invalidate a decisive number of ballots proved that democracy is on shaky ground — both in North Carolina and across the country.

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"The fact that this scheme got as far as it did is a red, flashing warning that our elections remain vulnerable to judicial sabotage in politicized courts — as evidenced by North Carolina’s elected Republican judges buoying Griffin at every turn," Stern wrote. "The candidate’s refusal to accept his defeat has also set a dangerous precedent for future losers convinced they can pick off enough valid ballots to snatch an unearned win."

"As North Carolina itself shows, there is an immense partisan imbalance at play, with Democrats accepting their losses while Republicans reject theirs," he continued. "American democracy cannot long survive this destabilizing asymmetry."

Stern observed that current North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby won his own race in 2020 by just 401 votes — an even smaller margin than Riggs' win over Griffin. And that after former Chief Justice Cheri Beasley demanded a recount and still came up short, she accepted the results of the election. According to Stern, the differing approaches in how the two parties approach a narrow loss spells bad news for future elections.

"These Republican judges will pursue power at all costs, evincing zero respect for democracy or civil rights," he wrote. "Our constitutional system was not built to withstand a two-party system in which one side plays by the rules and the other scorns those rules as a sucker’s game."

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Click here to read Stern's full essay in Slate (subscription required).